Now all is to be changed. … All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
—Edmund Burke
Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. … Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Early in December, The New York Times carried an art review about the work of the performance artist Carolee Schneemann, one of whose efforts, “Interior Scroll,” consists of Ms. Schneemann slowly unraveling a text from her vagina while reading it aloud to her audience. Two days earlier, the Times had carried a news story about Jubal Brown, a Canadian student, whose performance art consisted in vomiting on works of art that he considered “oppressively trite and painfully banal.” As of this writing, a Mondrian in the Museum of Modern Art and a Dufy in the Art Gallery of Ontario are known to have been unwillingly collaborators in this exercise of reverse peristalsis. What can one say? The extraordinary thing about these unsavory episodes is that they are no longer extraordinary. They are simply bulletins about the way we live now. For every Carolee Schneemann, there are a hundred Karen Finleys, prancing about naked on a stage somewhere, smeared in chocolate and skirling about the the evils of patriarchy and the stinginess of the National Endowment for the Arts. For every Jubal Brown, there are a hundred Andres Serranos making photographs of crucifixes in urine or Robert Mapplethorpes registering horrific scenes of sexual torture and excretory perversion for the delectation of the art world’s “cutting edge.” This is old news now, business as usual, more of the same. But what does that tells us about ourselves?
It is clear, at any rate, that the moral collapse on view in the advanced precincts of the art world is not confined to the art world. On the contrary, it is a corollary of the moral collapse suffered by society at large. We live, after all, in a world where underwear advertisements on buses are indistinguishable from mild pedophilic pornography, where pornography of the harshest, most dehumanizing variety is (for the most part) a legitimate multi-billion-dollar industry, catering to and exacerbating all manner of degeneration through magazines, videos, photographs, and, lately, the Internet. Couples queue up to participate in television talk shows, eager to discuss with clinical exactness the details of their sex lives, proud to demonstrate that they have nothing to hide. Radio talk shows compete for explicitness. Ditto Hollywood. Just out, for example, is a celebrated movie portraying the pornographer Larry Flynt as a hero of the First Amendment. Billboards in airports depict cheery, bow-tied phalluses sheathed in condoms and bearing the legend “What the well-dressed penis is wearing.” Even grade-school children are instructed in techniques of “safe sex” lest they wander off the playground unacquainted with the use of a condom.
Of course, sex is not the only once-private matter now subjected to the glare of universal publicity. Every detail of a man’s or woman’s physiological existence is now ventilated with nary a blush or hesitation. Shyness, modesty, pudeur: we are beyond all that. If President Reagan suffers from colon polyps, it is only to be expected that the evening news will display pictures of his digestive tract with the offending bits color-coded for viewer identification.
We live, in short, at a time when nothing is too private or personal that it cannot be broadcast and dissected in public. “Intimacy” is now a public project, “private life” merely one of the things exposed in tabloids and prime-time television. How did we get in this situation? What happened that art and pathology are now so often indistinguishable? What happened that “shame,” “discretion,” and “reticence” are, for many, no longer regarded as virtues but as antique and eminently dispensable habits of mind? The quick answer is the 1960s. It was then that the wholesale attack on convention, the demand for sexual liberation, and the spirit of moral Prometheanism—everything that is summed up by the word “counterculture”—coalesced and achieved critical mass. Attitudes and behavior previously unthinkable outside the pages of utopian tracts or black-market pornography became first acceptable, then widespread.
But if the 1960s marked the culmination of what Thomas Sowell has called the “agenda of degeneration,” that agenda has a long and complex history. Unearthing that history and examining its moral implications are the tasks that Rochelle Gurstein has undertaken in The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. Let me say straight off that this is a remarkable book: passionate, learned, and fueled by a moral intelligence that never becomes preachy or moralistic. Ms. Gurstein, who teaches at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, tells us in her acknowledgements that The Repeal of Reticence began life as a dissertation—directed, in part, by the historian Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994 in his early sixties. Ms. Gurstein notes that her “first debt” is to Lasch, and readers familiar with his work will detect his influence throughout The Repeal of Reticence: in the way Ms. Gurstein structures her argument, her use of sources, even her syntax and diction. In places, The Repeal of Reticence bears the unfortunate earmarks of its origins in the Ph.D. assembly line; it is repetitive, overly schematic—what Ms. Gurstein calls “the party of reticence” and “the party of exposure” seem at times like battling chess pieces—and some of the literature she discusses is more thoroughly rehearsed than digested. None of this matters much, though. For what one chiefly notices about the book is its display of dignity, maturity, and common sense. This is not academic make-work but a serious contribution to one of the most pressing intellectual discussions of our time.
Ms. Gurstein describes her basic concern as the effort “to understand how the idea of exposure, which once had been equated with shamelessness, impudence, and impropriety, came to be celebrated as the premier agency of enlightenment and emancipation.” How did it happen, she wonders, that many people, seemingly intelligent and well-informed, now find themselves paralyzed in the face of basic moral questions, unwilling or unable to distinguish between “the essential circulation of ideas, which is the cornerstone of liberal democracy, and the commercial exploitation of news, entertainment, and sex as commodities”? It was not always this way, and one of Ms. Gurstein’s chief aims in this book is to “recover the origins of what was once a vital debate about what belongs in public and trace how it has degenerated into its current predictable form.”
Ms. Gurstein is hardly alone in her concern about such matters. Indeed, her book taps into a reservoir of renewed feeling about manners, propriety, decorum, what is and is not fitting for display in public. In some respects, for example, Ms. Gurstein’s topic overlaps with the topic of Roger Shattuck’s new book, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.[1] Both books are engaged in a search for moral limits in a world where limits of any kind seem at best arbitrary. Both, it is worth noting, are written from a perspective of what we might call chastened or disabused liberalism. What we have here are essentially liberal reassessments, not conservative polemics. But where Mr. Shattuck’s guiding theme is the question “Are there things we should not know?” Ms. Gurstein’s overriding question is “Are there things we should not show?” That is to say, her primary focus is on behavior, not knowledge. She is concerned with the health of the public sphere, “the crucial relationship between what is said or done in public and the cultural and political life of a democracy.” Following the philosopher Hannah Arendt—the other major intellectual influence on her book—Ms. Gurstein finds a key to the fate of public life in the fortunes of the delicate faculties that preside over it: taste, judgment, decorum, a sense of what is fitting and what is not. If “the public sphere has degenerated into a stage for sensational displays of matters the people formerly would have considered unfit for public appearance,” the primary reason is the disease or repudiation of taste—once a public trust, now increasingly a matter of subjective fancy.
On this issue, Ms. Gurstein approvingly quotes Arendt, who describes taste as the “activity … that decides how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it.” That of course was once upon a time. “In our time,” Ms. Gurstein laments,
taste has no public resonance at all; rather, it has been drastically reduced to mean little more than individual whim or consumer preference. In consequence, judgments about which things should appear in public, speculation about the common good, as well as deliberation about moral and aesthetic matters, have increasingly been relegated to the obscurity of the private realm, leaving everyone to his or her own devices.
Ms. Gurstein’s brief remarks on “taste and the common world” (as she titles her Introduction) are among the most suggestive and provocative things in her book. It is a pity that she does not develop them more fully. She alludes frequently to the corruption and what we might call the privatization of taste. And she notes in passing that, with the eclipse of reticence, “the faculties of taste and judgment—along with the sense of the sacred and the shameful—have become utterly vacant.” But she provides virtually no discussion of the faculties of taste and judgment themselves. In particular, she has little of substance to say about the chief matter of contention: exactly how these activities, which for many today seem almost the paradigm of subjectivity, can assume anything like an authoritative, public function.
Hints about how taste and judgment might fulfill the essentially political ambition that Ms. Gurstein alludes to are contained in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (which, incidentally, Kant originally intended to call the Critique of Taste), especially in those sections where Kant describes taste as “a faculty common to all” and attempts to reconcile the unavoidable subjectivity of taste (“everyone is entitled to his own taste”) with its claims to universality (we in fact depend on our judgments of taste being widely shared). “This is done,” Kant suggests, through the imagination, by “putting ourselves in the place of others.” We thereby leave behind our attachment to what is particular to ourselves and achieve the “enlarged mode of thought” that he believed the exercise of taste encouraged. Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, extended Kant’s sketchy analysis, making it more concrete and developing it into a view of life that made taste and aesthetic experience the key to the development of man’s humanity and sociability. And Hannah Arendt, in a slim volume on Kant’s political philosophy that Ms. Gurstein does not mention, suggestively puts taste at the center of her discussion, showing how the exercise of taste, though seemingly the most idiosyncratic of faculties, always points beyond itself to a common world and shared meanings. Thus the paradox that, as Kant put it, “in taste egoism is overcome.”
Ms. Gurstein does not enter much into details about the nature of taste. But she does provide a social history of its dissolution. In effect, her book offers a chronicle of diminution: the diminution of the public sphere from a rich field of shared meanings that exercise a legitimate claim on our affections, passions, and habits to a brutish, depopulated realm where the only recognized claim is a legal one. “It is a sign of our time,” Ms. Gurstein notes, that the rejection of common-sense standards of decency and propriety in the name of “freedom of choice” “is automatically offered not only on behalf of commercial entertainment but also for obscene art and pornography; and it is offered with equal gusto by Hollywood, Broadway, and Madison Avenue as well as by postmodern academics, liberal arts administrators, ‘advanced’ artists, record companies, and First Amendment lawyers.”
Ms. Gurstein’s ambition is twofold. On the one hand, she looks back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to trace the intellectual and moral origins of the attack on propriety in the debate over such matters as birth control and sexual hygiene, realism in art and literature, and the rise of a sensationalistic, mass-circulation press that was often criticized for invading privacy for the sake of a story. In every case, she shows, “enlightened,” progressive opinion carried the day—to such an extent, indeed, that “the problem of recognizing indecency has a quaint ring today, since a belief made popular by the party of exposure is that concern for indecency is nothing more than a foolish Victorian or Puritan throwback.” As Ms. Gurstein observes, nowadays “the mere mention of Puritans is enough to demolish an enemy.” What does it tell us that we are more afraid of being accused of being “puritanical” than condemned as immoral?
Ms. Gurstein has done a good deal of original research. Her discussion of such pivotal figures as Charles Eliot Norton (one of the quiet heroes of her book) and William Dean Howells, the Comstock Act of 1873 (which prohibited sending sexually explicit materials through the mails), and early legal battles over privacy and obscenity is deft and illuminating. She colors in the rich, often tangled historical background for the free-speech debates that, in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to transform the moral fabric of American life.
It is worth noting, for example, that until the 1950s, battles over obscenity did not centrally involve First Amendment issues as they inevitably do today; in fact, free speech was explicitly excluded by the courts as a defense for trafficking in obscene materials. The problem was not defining obscenity—as Ms. Gurstein notes, there was remarkable unanimity about that—but in assessing the degree of public harm the circulation of certain materials might be expected to cause. “Obscenity was successfully regulated,” she notes, “because there was broad consensus about indecency, rooted in the old standards of the reticent sensibility.” Gradually, however, the whole debate shifted until the startling view put forward by the social reformer Theodore Schroeder in 1911 became the norm: “All obscenity,” he wrote, “is in the viewing mind, not in the book or picture.” (Schroeder was clearly a man ahead of his time: “Our best scientific thinkers,” he wrote with the sort of fatuous bravado of which tenured professorships are made today, “concur in the belief that morality is relative and progressive.”)
The privatization of obscenity was tantamount to an admission of moral impotence. As Ms. Gurstein points out, “once discussions about obscenity become fixed exclusively on the incitement of private sexual responses and have nothing to say about the deterioration of the public sphere, the coarsening of standards of taste and judgment, or the waning of the sense of shame, the entire matter becomes weightless.” Unfortunately, such weightlessness is an incitement to extremism. In the absence of any clearly recognized standards of what counts as obscene, the ante is always upped. One taboo after the another falls before the “transgressive” experiments of an amoral elite bent on “testing the limits” of so-called free speech. So it is that today, as Ms. Gurstein notes toward the end of her book,
it is not a question of Comstock ludicrously trying to stop the Art Students’ League from mailing a pamphlet with reproductions of studio nudes. Instead, it is libertarians with the full machinery of the state behind them fighting for the rights of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses, the rights of bigots to scream racial slurs, and the rights of pornographers to their exploitative trade in women.
Liberals celebrate the introduction of First Amendment protection for obscenity as a victory for progress and freedom; “it is better understood,” Ms. Gurstein observes, “as a marker of the disappearance of shared ideas about what constitutes obscenity and what constitutes art.”
Obviously, Ms. Gurstein is more than a dispassionate historian, uncovering the forgotten roots of contemporary debates. She also wishes to reflect critically on their outcome. Accordingly, her second aim is to ask whether there is anything worth recovering from the earlier debates she presents in such meticulous detail, “especially from the losing side.” What can we gain, for example, by comparing the debate over Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the debate over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs or Karen Finley’s episodes of exhibitionism? Noting that “yesterday’s stirring calls to arms have deteriorated into today’s tired clichés,” Ms. Gurstein asks whether the arguments in favor of the “avant-garde” deserve the “automatic endorsement” they currently enjoy.
The story that Ms. Gurstein tells is not only compelling but also poignant. For it is in large part a tale of the unexpected consequences of good intentions. The history of what Ms. Gurstein calls “the repeal of reticence” (her title comes from a 1914 essay by the writer Agnes Repplier) is the story of the enlightened sensibility of progressive liberalism confronting the unsavory results of the logic of unfettered emancipation. “Enthusiasts of exposure,” Ms. Gurstein explains,
extended the Enlightenment commitment of flooding light into dark places to matters previously believed to be either private or not worthy of public consideration; in the name of equality, they stretched the prospect of democracy to realms previously understood as being non-political, specifically the home and the arts. And by speaking in the name of progress, they indicted privacy for blocking the light of emancipation and in so doing, successfully discredited the discourse of reticence as a language of cover-up and repression.
Alas, what was meant to free mankind from the shackles of ignorance, superstition, and prejudice wound up trivializing or besmirching the very things this new freedom was meant to salvage. “It is,” Ms. Gurstein observes, “one of the bitterest of historical ironies that the means employed by modern reformers and cultural radicals to realize this cherished ideal [of intimacy] exposed it to a kind of light that violated the privacy required to nurture it, which, in turn, stripped love of its value.”
In the end, the problem with progressive, reforming liberalism is not its amorality but its superficiality. Subjecting what Burke called the “decent drapery of life” to the reductive scenarios of unanchored rationalism, it is always tempted to replace the rich texture of human reality with some utopian dogma. Thus it is with privacy and intimacy. Prior to the modern age, Ms. Gurstein notes, everything connected with mankind’s animal or biological life–childbirth, sickness, sex, excretion, death—was enveloped by a filigree of privacy, shame, and taboo. With the elevation of private life into the limelight of publicity—epitomized in what one historian called the “doctrine of no secrets”—all that changed. Henceforth, the only absolute taboo was the idea that there might in fact be absolute taboos. “Sophisticated moderns, breaking with the wisdom of all previous ages, typically pride themselves on their ability to live without such ‘sentimental’ or ‘romantic’ illusions. What makes the modern understanding of privacy modern is this scorn for the very idea of the sacred.”
No doubt the reforming movements that Ms. Gurstein describes achieved some good. But there is an important sense in which enlightened attacks on shame and taboo mark a retreat from civilization. Thus it is that Ms. Gurstein argues that the
reverence for privacy should not be simply dismissed, as it always is today, as mere Victorian prudery. Instead it should be understood as a highly elaborated form of the age-old wisdom that joins privacy, shame, and the sacred at the very deepest level of consciousness. The reticent sensibility is at one with the perspective of all societies that recognize limits to knowledge and thus approach the unknowable with awe and wonder.
Another aspect of the superficiality of the progressive liberalism chronicled in The Repeal of Reticence is its tendency to Pelagianism—that is, to the naïve belief that (as Ms. Gurstein puts it) “unhappiness existed not because of limitations inherent in the human condition but because of social conventions that had rigidified over time.” If unhappiness is due to cumbersome and outworn conventions, why not simply dispense with the offending conventions? After all, what are social conventions but the distillate of age-old prejudice? “For the party of exposure,” Ms. Gurstein notes, “once a custom or a convention was unmasked as contingent and lost its legitimacy, the way was paved for new freedoms.” Unfortunately, all too often the other side of those new freedoms was a new sense of meaninglessness and emptiness. The attack on convention as “merely contingent” again betrays a rationalistic hubris. As Ms. Gurstein notes, “all law is rooted in the customs of a particular place and time, as it is codified in common law and in legislation.” In this sense, contingency is more an argument for caution than for license: “the very contingency and therefore fragility of customs, which preserve the best common wisdom of a people thus far and give life its distinctive moral shape, make it imperative to be discerning and sympathetic even as one is critical.” It is perhaps a pleasing fantasy that reason allows us to do without the accumulated wisdom and prohibitions of our ancestors, but it is a fantasy nonetheless. As Agnes Repplier wisely observed, “If knowledge alone could save us from sin, the salvation of the world would be easy work.”
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
- The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art, by Rochelle Gurstein; Hill and Wang, 357 pages, $27.50. Go back to the text.
- Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, by Roger Shattuck; St. Martin’s Press, 370 pages, $26.95. Go back to the text.